A uniform resource locator (URL) for a website can usually be accessed from anywhere at any time. However some types of information may be dependent on time. For example, broadcasts are usually viewed by local municipalities and regions. In another example, certain sports broadcasts are “blacked out” regionally due to poor local ticket sales. Furthermore, some broadcasts are restricted by time zone. For instance, election results are often controlled by time zones.
Standard time zones can be defined by geometrically subdividing the Earth's spheroid into 24 lunes (wedge-shaped sections), bordered by meridians each 15° of longitude apart. The local time in neighboring zones is then exactly one hour different. However, political and geographical practicalities can result in irregularly-shaped zones that follow political boundaries or that change their time seasonally (as with daylight saving time), as well as being subject to occasional redefinition as political conditions change. Additionally, there are variations of the definitions of time zone which generally fall into two meanings: a time zone can represent a region where the local time is some fixed offset from a global reference, or a time zone can represent a region throughout which the local time is always consistent even though the offset may fluctuate seasonally.
An obvious surge in worldwide communication over the years has increased the need for interacting parties to communicate mutually comprehensible time references to one another. Sophisticated e-mail clients may have all sorts of bells and whistles, but at the core, e-mail clients basically just send simple text messages to recipients. In the beginning and even today, e-mail messages tend to be short pieces of text, although the ability to add attachments now makes many e-mail messages quite long. Even with attachments, however, e-mail messages continue to be text messages. Email clients show lists of all of the messages in mailboxes by displaying the message headers. The header shows who sent the mail, the subject of the mail and may also show the time and date of the message and the message size. They let a user select a message header and read the body of the e-mail message. Also, they allow the user to create new messages and send them.
E-commerce companies love e-mail, and for good reason. Production costs are low; results are immediate. Personalized e-mail are messages that consumers sign up to receive or that companies can target at customers based on their previous purchases. Furthermore, targeted e-mail marketing requires a much bigger investment than simply blasting out untargeted e-mail messages because it involves sophisticated databases and statistical modeling.
Targeted e-mail is also more prone to error. Sending a personalized message to the wrong person can ruin a relationship for life. So can a message that overloads a customer's computer. But as long as the e-commerce company chooses the right words and format, experts agree that talking to customers is not only good for sales but also good for name recognition. Any excuse to interact with your customer is healthy for the brand, and targeted e-mail seems to be one of healthiest direct-marketing ways to build brand equity.
Accordingly, the ability to market a product or service to individuals who are accessible on the Internet is becoming increasingly important. Email systems exist today for sending email to a target set of email addresses for purposes such as marketing, information acquisition, and otherwise. A system for sending email to a number of email targets for such purposes may be called an email campaign.
Thus, it would be desirable to have a system and a method for regional and time zone based messaging that addresses the inefficiencies of conventional approaches and provides further enhancements to message distribution.
The present invention provides a solution to these needs and other problems, and offers other advantages over the prior art.